May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

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331 Yankl Lapp, “Heroism (Episodes),” in Shuval, The Szczebrzeszyn Memorial Book, 29.

332 Joe Friesen, “Black Belt Teen Strikes Back at Bully, and Rallies Community Around Racism,” The Globe and Mail, April 30, 2009; Joe Friese, “Hate-crime Investigator Digs Deeper Into bullying Brawl,” The Globe and Mail, May 1, 2009.

333 Account of Rivka Barlev in Kosow Lacki, 14.

334 Account of Leo Scher, Loiusiana Holocaust Survivors, The Southern Institute for Education and Research, posted at .

335 See, for example, Yehoshya Zilber, “The Revisionist Part,” in M. Bakalczuk-Felin, ed., Commemoration Book Chelm, Internet: ; translation of Yisker-bukh Chelm (Johannesburg: Former Residents of Chelm, 1954), 213–14 (the local Polish authorities in Chełm alerted the police commander, who sent out patrols to ensure that rumoured violence did not erupt).

336 Many examples of police interventions, arrests, and criminal trials in Lwów are noted in Grzegorz Mazur, Życie polityczne polskiego Lwowa 1918–1939 (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2007), 219–74. For examples of interventions by the Polish authorities in the Wilno, Lublin and Łódź areas see, respectively, Januszewska-Jurkiewicz, Stosunki narodowościowe na Wileńszczyźnie w latach 1920–1939, 559, and Zbigniew Zaporowski, “Miaszteczko i sztetl: Polacy i Żydzi w województwie lubelskim w przededniu II wojny światowej,” and Michał Trębacz, “Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w województwie łódzkim (1938–1939),” in Sitarek, Trębacz, and Wiatr, Zagłada Żydów na polskiej prowincji, 25–26, 45–46. See also the following: “Glowno”, in Pinkas ha-kehilot: Polin, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), 81–84, translated as Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, Internet: (six instigators of riots were put on trial and jailed for 4 to 8 months); “Opatow”, in Pinkas ha-kehilot: Polin, vol. 7 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999), 58–64, translated as Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, Internet: (rioters who attacked stores and stalls of Jews in Opatów were arrested, brought to trial, and sentenced); “Radzyn,” in Pinkas ha-kehilot: Polin, vol. 7, 543–47, translated as Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, Internet: ; “Sosnowiec,” in Pinkas ha-kehilot: Polin, vol. 7, 327–38, translated as Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, Internet: . Notwithstanding this overwhelming evidence, some Jewish historians claim the Polish authorities were complicit in these disturbances and that the administration largely remained inactive. See, for example, Prusin, The Lands Between, 118–19.

337 Polish rioters were shot by the police in Odrzywół on November 20, 1935, when 12 Poles were killed and some 20 were wounded, and in Radziłów on March 23, 1933, when two Poles were killed and two died of their wounds in the hospital. For a description of the police pacification in Wyszyn near Chodzież, see Rafał Sierchuła and Piotr Szewczyński, “Sprawa zabójstwa Wawrzyńca Sielskiego w Wyszynie: Policyjna pacyfikacja Stronnictwa Narodowego w powiecie konińskim w lutym 1936 r. w świetle dokumentów prokratury,” Glaukopis (Warsaw), vol. 29 (2013): 284–318.

338 See, for example, Eliasz Bialski, Patrząc prosto w oczy (Montreal: Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation, 2002), 24. The author recalls the friendly attitude of his professors at the Main School of Farming (Główna Szkoła Gospodarstwa Wiejskiego) in Warsaw. Ibid., 41. Bronisława Witz-Margulies, a Jewish student at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, recalled the opposition on the part of her Polish professors, all of whom she held in high esteem, to the so-called “bench ghettos” introduced by nationalist students. See Bronisława Witz-Margulies, “Jan Kazimierz University 1936–1939: A Memoir,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 14 (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001): 223–36. According to Jewish sources, Jewish students comprised 24.6 percent of the entire Polish university population in the 1921–22 academic year, and 20 percent in 1928–29. In 1932–33 their number fell to 18.7 percent, and in 1935–36, to 13.3 percent. By 1936–37 they comprised 11.8 percent of all students, and in 1937–38 only 10 percent (which was slightly higher than their overall share of the country’s population). These figures do not include many Poles of Jewish origin among the intelligentsia who had converted to Catholicism. See Raphael Mahler, “Jews in Public Service and the Liberal Professions in Poland, 1918–39,” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 6, no. 4 (October 1944), 341. According to official Polish sources, in 1934–35 Jews accounted for 18 percent of all high school students, 16.2 percent of vocational school students, and 14.8 percent of higher school (university, etc.) students. Jews comprised 23.7 percent of students enrolled at the University of Warsaw, 25.8 percent at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, 29.7 percent at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno, and 31.8 percent at the John Casimir University in Lwów. See Mały rocznik statystyczny 1937 (Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny, 1937), 312. Even with the admission restrictions imposed in the mid–1930’s so that the number of Jewish students would not be disproportionate to their share of the population, Jews continued to be overrepresented at some Polish universities. For example, at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno, in the 1938–39 academic year, 417 of the 3,110 students enrolled were Jewish, or about 13½ percent of the student body (other minorities accounted for 432 students, or almost 14 percent), whereas in 1926–27 Jews constituted 25.6% of the student population, and in 1928–29 30.4%, with a heavy concentration in medicine and law. (See Piotr Łossowski, ed., Likwidacja Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego przez władze litewskie w grudniu 1939 roku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Interlibro, 1991), 74; Januszewska-Jurkiewicz, Stosunki narodowościowe na Wileńszczyźnie w latach 1920–1939, 553–54. For detailed statistics for the Jagellonian University in Kraków, see Mariusz Kulczykowski, Żydzi–studenci Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej (1919–1939) (Kraków: Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 2004). It should also be noted that enrolment levels in Polish universities was very low by European and North American standards, e.g., the university in Wilno, the only university in northeastern Poland, had only 3,110 students in the 1938–39 academic year. Jewish nationalists were already complaining about alleged discriminatory admission practices at that university when the proportion of Jews reached 30% of the student body in the 1920’s. It is apparent, therefore, that no amount of accommodations would have pleased them or allowed large numbers of Jews to attend Polish universities, given their relatively small size.

British intellectual Rafael F. Scharf, who attended the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, writes: “It is true that there was the so-called numerus clausus in the Faculty of Medicine, meaning that only a restricted number of Jewish students were accepted—and we made a great deal of fuss about it. If there had been no restrictions of that kind … Jewish medics might have greatly outnumbered their non-Jewish colleagues—a situation which, not surprisingly, was not tenable in the prevailing conditions. Considering that sons and daughters of practicing Doctors of Medicine could, if they wished, enter the Faculty outside the quota, that numerus clausus rule, in retrospect, does not appear so monstrous.” See Rafael F. Scharf, Poland, What Have I To Do with Thee…: Essays without Prejudice, Bilingual edition (Kraków: Fundacja Judaica, 1996), 209. Jewish accounts alleging discrimination tend to grossly exaggerate the situation by suggesting that virtually every Jew who was not admitted to university was the victim of anti-Semitism. The reality was quite different. In his memoirs, one Jew describes how he was one of 500 Jews who applied for 200 places at the Warsaw School of Medicine. Of the 200 students admitted annually, 80 places were reserved for members of the military medical corps, 100 for non-Jewish applicants and the rest, 20 for Jews. The Jewish quota corresponded to the percentage of Jews in the country. However, even if 50 had been admitted, still 90 percent of those Jews who applied would have been rejected for reasons other than anti-Semitism. See Haskell Nordon, The Education of a Polish Jew: A Physician’s War Memoirs (New York: D. Grossman Press, 1982), 82–83. Some accounts are even more far-fetched in hurling false accusations. Rosalie Silberman Abella, who sits on the Supreme Court of Canada, has gone out of her way to publicize that her father, who attended Jagiellonian University’s Faculty of Law from 1930 to 1934, was allegedly “one of only four [sic] Jews permitted entry under quotas,” and that Jewish students were assigned special seats in the lecture rooms. See, among others, her Opening Address at the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Benchers’ Retreat, October 14, 1999, Internet: